From Artificial Rarity to Plethoric Offer

The provision (and thus the supply) of top-level domain names (or extensions) on Internet is the monopoly of a private international organization: ICANN. Since 1998 and the massive development of Internet, this organization has allowed the creation of a very limited number of these extensions. The artificial scarcity thus created explains the domination of one particular extension, the “.com”, and the generation of a surplus for the firm managing it: Verisign (Part 1). Due to heavy criticism, ICANN decided to liberalize the creation of new extensions, from the end of 2013. In this article the authors examine the economic arguments exchanged during the period preceding ICANN’s decision, and the possible reduction of the market dominance of the “.com” extension and Verisign (Part 2). They then present the modalities of creation of this new market for domain names and put forward some hypotheses for the future (Part 3).